A considerable number of sociological, economic, and cultural influences shape art, moulding our conceptions on how we understand, judge, and value it. As the maxim goes - we shape our environment and our environment shapes us - As another maxim goes: Give children crayons, and they draw. They invariably create something. We never really grow up do we?

Tuesday, 1 April 2008

18 months ago the international media picked up on
President Chirac’s outburst at an EU’s conference on business and subsequently
ran biased, sycophantic, and expectedly liberalistic stories about the global
spread of English.

Needless to say, my own article falls into one of those
three categories. I am, as a native speaker, subject to the grammatical law of
my language as each person is to their own. I am also privileged because I can communicate almost anywhere in the world and be understood, but my language is
at the forefront of ‘linguicide’, along with Chinese, Spanish, French and
Arabic, destroying minority languages, along with culture and customs in many
cases.

Chirac’s concern was not at someone speaking English
but at one of his own countrymen doing so. The French government has laws in
place, concerning the cultural value of French that protects that value from
the influence of foreign languages, principally Anglo-Saxon, and rightly so.

Other countries such as Bhutan, Iran, or semi-autonomous regions like Basque
[and Tibet] adopt similar methods, of varying degrees, of protecting their
cultures from outside influences; or recently the newly elected President of
Bolivia promised to decrease the predominance of Spanish in favour of local
indigenous tongues. In Italy, I must watch a foreign TV programme in dubbed
Italian, but in Portugal I can hear the original language, perhaps because the
Portuguese government is less sensitive as there are a 150 million speakers of
Portuguese in Brazil.

In India, a sub-continent with hundreds of dialects, its
parliament speaks in English, an alien language, otherwise each speech
community would never be able to agree on whose dialect to use. This was the
reason for the creation of Esperanto in the EU because it was not indigenous to
any state; a wonderful idea in principle except that it failed, not for any
innate error but for lack of native speakers and cooperation.

Yet, in the UN’s General Assembly every member country speaks in its own language, appropriately
but not without problems. There are numerous positive arguments for global
languages, we all know the benefits but English marginalises populations whose
first language is not a global language, then it can and does lead to cultural
and economic domination of the populations speaking English as a first
language.

It would appear attempts like ‘Esperanto’ at this stage
of our history are the roads forward. Is EngSpanAraFrenEse feasible (Spanglish
exists)? If we all put our heads together to make such a language would it
succeed, or be the exclusive language of those in power?